Posthuman Rights: The Ethics of Alien Encounter

Do posthuman subjects have human rights? My chapter will examine this question through the trope of human-alien encounter in science fiction (SF). This trope enables us to go beyond the naturalizing discourse of "human rights" as the foundation of ethical community and to consider new ways of forming moral judgments and ascribing an ethical status to an entity. My focus will be on the confrontation with the totally Other: that is, with an alien intelligence that resists both cognitive and psychological appropriation by humanity. Depicting such intelligence in a literary text poses problems of representation that parallel ethical and epistemological challenges of an encounter with the totally Other. I will analyse the narrative strategies used to resolve these problems, specifically the manipulation of the point of view, the ambiguous closure, and the figure of the human/alien mediator, as indicating both the crisis of humanism and the tentative emergence of posthuman alternatives. The dissolution of the biological boundaries of humanity in the postmodern episteme necessitates questioning the basis for moral judgment in the humanistic assumption of "inalienable rights". By creating scenarios of encounter with an epistemologically opaque and biologically different intelligence, SF suggests the concept of ‘alien rights’, residing not in the humanity but in the non-humanity of the Other. My argument attempts to go beyond Lévinas' ethics of the face-to-face encounter, which is still bound by anthropocentrism. The absence of the (humanly recognizable) face is what both compels an attempt at contact and causes its failure. The ethical imperative arises in the schism between the two. The chapter will focus on Stanislaw Lem's classic SF novels of alien encounter: Eden (1959), Solaris (1961) and Fiasco (1989).